install.md

Installing Calypso

You can install Calypso directly on your machine by following the next steps, or use a portable development environment:

Quick Summary of Steps

1. Check that you have all prerequisites (Git, Node, NPM). See below for more details.
2. Clone this repository locally.
3. Add 127.0.0.1 calypso.localhost to your local hosts file.
4. Execute npm start or npm run dashboard (for a more visually-oriented interface) from the root directory of the repository.
5. Open calypso.localhost:3000 in your browser.

Prerequisites

To be able to clone the repository and run the application you need:

• Install the Node.js and matching NPM versions listed in the engines section of package.json. On Mac OS X and Linux using nvm or n makes it easy to manage node versions. On Windows you may want to try nvm-windows or nodist.
• Git. Try the git command from your terminal, if it's not found then use this installer.

Installing and Running

Clone this git repository to your machine via the terminal using the git clone command and then run npm start from the root Calypso directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso.git
$ cd wp-calypso
$ npm start

The npm start command will install any npm dependencies and start the development server. When changes are made to either the JavaScript files or the Sass stylesheets, the build process will run automatically. The build process compiles both the JavaScript and CSS to make sure that you have the latest versions of both.

To run Calypso locally, you'll need to add 127.0.0.1 calypso.localhost to your hosts file, and load the app at http://calypso.localhost:3000 instead of just localhost. This is necessary, because when running locally Calypso is using the remote version of the WordPress.com REST API, which allows only certain origins via our current authentication methods.

See Development Workflow for more.

Starting the node debugger

The npm start command will pass anything set in the NODE_ARGS environment variable as an option to the Node command. This means that if you want to start up the debugger on a specific port you can run NODE_ARGS="--debug=5858" npm start. Starting the built-in inspector can also by done by running NODE_ARGS="--inspect" npm start. In either case, if you would like to debug the build process as well, it might be convenient to have the inspector break on the first line and wait for you. In that case, you should also pass in the --debug-brk option like so NODE_ARGS="--inspect --debug-brk" npm start.

Using a portable development environment

You can install Calypso very quickly via a portable development environment called Calypso Bootstrap. It uses Vagrant and Puppet behind the scenes to install and configure a virtual machine with Calypso ready to run - with a single command.